She taught in literature and women's studies in Australia from 1972, first at the universities of Newcastle and Melbourne, and then from 1979 at Deakin University (Geelong). In 1993 she took up a position at the University of Victoria, Canada, and in 1995 she became Professor of English and Women's Studies at UBC. She was Director of the Centre for Research in Women’s and Gender Studies (2002–2007), North American editor of Feminist Theory (Sage; 2006–2010), and Associate Principal of the College for Interdisciplinary Studies, UBC (2008–2011). She retired as Professor Emerita in 2014 from the
UBC Department of English Language and Literatures. In 1984, she was a panelist with Homi Bhabha and
Gayatri Spivak at an early landmark postcolonial conference, “Europe and its Others,” at the
University of Essex.
Edward Said, author of
Orientalism (1978), a founding figure of post-colonial theory, was in the audience. In a 1986 interview with Spivak, she asks “[Why] are other writers like [Antigone] Kefala,
Ania Walwicz, Rosa Cappiello, etc., not seen as part of these [Australian] cultural productions, why aren't they given a full measure of cultural franchise?” She and others took action to have non-Anglo-Celtic writers acknowledged as contributing to the national literature. In 1992, she compiled with others
A Bibliography of Australian Multicultural Writers and co-edited
Striking Chords: Multicultural Literary Interpretations, the first collection of critical essays to deal with ethnic minority writings in the Australian context. She noted that multicultural writers are often “fungible,” like money, in the sense that any one will do: those that appear in early national anthologies are exchanged for new ones as a demonstration of tolerance, with none “sticking” as part of the national literature nor arriving in the canon. Her positioning begins with the idea of the “cultural hybridity of all nation-states” that leads to a “productive opening up into difference.” For her, the ostensibly all-inclusive “liberal pluralist notion of cultural diversity” cannot recognize or discuss “incommensurable differences,” which leads to the inability to interrogate any eruption of right-wing “politics of exclusion.” At Deakin University, she set up the first library collection of ethnic minority writings in Australia. Her first book,
Framing Marginality: Multicultural Literary Studies (1994) was an attempt to find theoretical frameworks and concepts for interpreting these texts—a mix of postmodernist and psychoanalytic criticism. She also edited two collections that publicized Australian feminist work to an international readership as well as ensuring this included the work of Australian First Nations scholar
Jackie Huggins. As a member of the
Australia Council for the Arts, the main funding body for the arts in Australia (1990–93), she set up and chaired the Multicultural Advisory Committee. In addition she was involved in creating appropriate policies relating to multicultural arts at a federal and state level as part of her membership on several committees working towards a multicultural Australia.
Canada In Canada she worked on comparative multiculturalisms and diasporic literatures and their intersections with national and global cultural formations. Recent publications dealt with multilingual affect, looking to widen the terminology of affect studies to include “emotion terms” in languages other than English. She writes: What is very much a question for me at the moment is that if you are constructed in one particular kind of language, what kinds of violence does it do to your subjectivity if one then has to move into another language, and suppress whatever selves or subjectivities were constructed by the first? And of course, some people have to pass through this process several times. Her final word on how to navigate literary-critical problems is “Hurrah for anything that puts into question certain familiar hegemonic monocultural assumptions.” == Personal life ==